Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:08

Hi everyone Today, I would like to introduce you to

Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:19

I'm excited to be here and get to hang out with you for a little bit.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:23

Well, atthew can you share a little bit about what you guys do at Thrive? Yeah, so Thrive is a publicly traded software company. We're headquartered in Dallas. We help entrepreneurs, business owners and franchises in the US, Canada and Australia and, in the simplest terms, Thrive helps small businesses navigate the customer experience. So, as you're interacting with consumers, you know they have really high expectations nowadays. And managing that whole experience from the time they're a lead to a paying customer to hopefully a repeat customer and an advocate for your business. There's a lot of different tools that you need and a lot of small businesses are using many different tools to manage that process, and what's really neat about Thrive is that it's a software that allows you to manage that all on one platform and it's very easy to use.

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 1:15

Well, Matthew, I know you work through the whole customer experience.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 1:18

I know you guys work through the whole customer experience. Can you explain how you guys do things differently from other companies.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 1:24

Yeah, so you know, my team and I were talking a little bit about this this morning. I was on a flight to Scotland last week and I was trying to tell this lady from Marriott what I do for a living and you know, I think of it in terms of a little bit like an orchestra. You know, you've got all these various instruments in an orchestra. You know playing. You know one tune or one song.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 1:44

When you're managing, when you're working with consumers, there's, you know, before they interact with you, you know being online there's. You know scheduling, there's some kind of database or CRM. You're maybe they saw you on social media you're trying to book appointments, right, you're issuing estimates, invoices, payments After they become a customer. You're asking for reviews and trying to create repeat business and that whole process is that customer journey right? And when you talk about customer experience, it's just how someone feels about your brand or your business at every point in that, in that journey.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 2:19

And the way that I want to go back to that orchestra thing is that you know there's all these tools that you need to manage that and small businesses and specifically, you know, franchisees normally are using seven or eight, sometimes 10, different tools to manage that and that's really tough. So you know to train, to scale and thrive as an all in one platform. So we have all the tools you need, but it's on one system, one log in. You know, and, and that's essentially what we're doing for small business and that's what we're. You know what my team does in franchising.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 2:55

So, if I understand this right, a few of those things like a customer experience CRM what all it does. So can you walk everybody through this and explain how it works, so that they can kind of follow along and understand when?

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 3:08

people move on yeah.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 3:09

So I think when you're thinking of the customer experience or customer journey right, you would you would think of it in three components, like before, during and after the sale. So if you think of before, you know let's say, lance, you owned a franchise location or a small business I'm probably looking for you or you know a business like what you know, the product or service that you offer. I'm going to Google, potentially social media right, and I'm looking for for your industry and I, you know, might find your Google profile or I might interact with you right to call or to try to schedule, and thrive helps business owners one appear online but then manage their Google profiles and the various different listing sites out there, along with their social media. So that's kind of the before process, right, when I make a phone call or go to your website to try to schedule, we have a scheduling tool within the thrive platform that can help an interested lead, you know, interact with you as a small business owner Once I do interact with you.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 4:09

At the core of thrives business center is a CRM. It's a CRM that, just like with many other CRMs, you can segment your customer base in there, and so, from your online presence to scheduling to the CRM. That's kind of that before piece of the customer journey. But then, once you know, maybe I schedule that appointment, you're coming out to my house, if you know, if you're a home-based business, you come out to my house, or maybe I'm going to your physical location. If you're a brick and mortar business, inside that platform we also allow the business owner to put different staff members in there. You can. There's a calendar to manage your staff members calendar. You can issue estimates, invoices and take payments within our platform. So it acts as a point of sale system as well. And then hopefully you know, once I, you know, do business with you, lance, and I pay that invoice or you set me up on a kind of a recurring payment or whatever.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 5:11

Your business model is right, you want to follow up with that customer to one, get them to come back, or two, be an advocate, right To go out there and really refer you to other people in the community. And so after the payment portion of Thrive, we have other tools like automated review request and we have email and text nurtures that are in the platform that will reach back out to that customer to ask for and solicit and get reviews. You can also respond to reviews in the platform and within Thrive we have email and text capabilities. You can set up email campaigns. You can set up automated campaigns to kind of go off at any time during the customer journey. So it's a lot. But at the same time small business owners are juggling a lot, you know, when they're trying to woo and excite and really provide a good experience for the consumer. It's really tough to do and normally they're using seven or eight different tools to do it. And our thing is that you could just use Thrive, one platform.

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 6:14

That sounds a lot easier than toggling back and forth between the tunnel programs to figure out what's going on, not having connected data to where you can actually see the numbers of share maybe some of the most memorable experiences, that conversion journey and customers have.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 6:31

Yeah, I mean we have 50, almost 55,000. We're getting close to 60,000 subscribers that use the platform. A lot of those are local independent businesses. We have almost four dozen franchise brands, all ranging from startup brands to more established brands that are using the platform as well. And you know I think that you know in my role I get to meet with a lot of different franchise oars and so there's a lot of different situations that I come across. We've had. We've had a brand that was really, really unorganized but had a great business and by instituting Thrive, if you think about what that does, that kind of standardizes the customer experience across all your locations. Right, it really standardizes a lot of your reporting and your finances. And after a year or so on our platform that that that business was able to be acquired by a platform company. So we spent some time working with that franchise order to kind of really get their house in order so that they could sell it and their lifelong dream they've been running the company for 15 years grew it to 50 locations and then they they were able to sell that and I was very happy to help that owner do that.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 7:47

You know, when you're thinking of making a switch in software, specifically in franchising, there's a lot of turmoil around moving from one system to the next, right?

Lance Hood (FranPro): 7:58

Let's say you have 10 locations and those franchisees are accustomed to a certain way of doing things. And then you come in as the franchisee or and you say, hey, by the way, we're switching to this process, right? There's a lot that goes into that and I could give you countless stories about how we helped various brands transition from whatever they were doing before to thrive in a very seamless way. That didn't, you know, the franchisees didn't really revolt and we're actually happy with what's going on because it made. The whole point of this is to make the franchisee's life easier. So if you're a new franchise or you're watching this, or just if you're a established brand, you understand and the biggest friction points between the franchise or the franchisee is when you go to make changes to the system. You know, especially when you go to make technological changes, it can really cause some friction between Zord and Z, and navigating that process and really communicating well within your own brand is critical.

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 9:00

Well, I just want to see if we can take a look at it.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 9:02

I was just going to say can we take a look at it here so everyone can see how it works and learn about it? Yeah, so what I thought I'd do for this is take 60 seconds, run through a couple of slides and then fire up actually what Thrive looks like in the platform and show you kind of everything that I've been talking about. But we talk about Thrive helps franchise, or so if you're watching this and you're a franchise, or we help you create thriving franchisees, we feel really that in order to scale a brand and make it successful, your franchisees need to be kicking butt. But just to check a couple of boxes, we are publicly traded, we're headquartered in Dallas and we are members of the IFA. I sit on the supplier forum board. We spent the last few years really really learning and working with franchises and I believe we have an incredible franchise team.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 9:51

But when the you know kind of the why behind, why Thrive exists within franchising is that the average franchisee uses seven tools to manage the customer experience, like everything that we've been talking about. If you think about from before, during and after the sale and think of your own franchisees and what they're using, there's three major components of the customer journey. There's communication, marketing and payments. Really, the sale behind Thrive is that if you look across the board there, it's an all in one platform. So we really help you manage that entire customer experience. You can standardize it at every location within your franchise brand by using our software and one other tool that I will maybe have some time to show you during this recording, but for our franchisee, or as we provide them, a multi location reporting platform that actually sits on top. So, if you think about it, you have 25 locations, 75, whatever, how many locations you have. Every single location would have a Thrive account and they're managing the customer experience in that account. But the data points and the KPIs and the different things that you're looking for, the usage at the location level rolls up to this product we call hub and it can help you track top line revenue. It can help you track email text, review campaigns, which clients are using it, appointments, different KPIs that you might have. So we have two really products there. So let me actually show you what the software looks like. So I'm going to show you guys a desktop or laptop version. We also have Thrive as an application that you can download on your smartphone. So let's get started.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 11:35

What I'm showing you here is just the simple log into business and we call it business center, but Thrive's Business Center, where your franchisee would log into this. There's a simple dashboard that provides them an overview of the payments that are happening calendar, social media and whatnot. But you have this navigation bar down the left here. In this navigation bar, there's a couple of key things I want to show you. One is the inbox. Here, all the communication that's coming from leads, current customers, vip, whatever the different types of customers that you might have that's all pulled into one inbox. You can be notified If someone's following up with you via email, if they're coming in through social media, like Facebook or your Instagram business page. That can be pulled into here.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 12:21

Another key component is the calendar. Here this works similarity Calendee or any of the other tools that you might be aware of, but you would have your staff accounts down here Then. This simply works just like any other calendar where you can create appointments, you can create group events, you can block off time, you can create recurring appointments. You can look at it from an event list view, but I think the core common piece of Thrive is the CRM, which is what I'm in now. When you scroll down here, let's just grab. This is a test account, so give me a little grace here. But let's say Alice in Goat. We wanted to look at Alice in Goat here. Alice in's account. When I click on it pulls up here and it's got everything that you would need to interact with this customer all in one place. We've got the conversation tab here where all my interactions with this lead would be hosted here.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 13:15

If you think about it, your franchisees might have employees that are interacting with their leads and customers and whatnot on their cell phone. If that employee finds a better option tomorrow and leaves, a lot of that interaction with that customer or lead might be in their cell phone and not stored in the Cloud, which is really what you want. When you go to look at resales and different things that your franchisees might look at down the road, you want a lot of the interaction with leads and customers stored in the Cloud so that the next person that maybe takes over or however that works would have access to that data. But just simply, here you have the conversation. I can interact with Allison a variety of different ways, including email text, facebook Messenger. There's a few other channels in here as well. I can create notes. It would say Rick, or it would say Matthew Gorgio or Lance Hood here the employee that's leaving that note can be listed here All her past and upcoming bookings, what those bookings were, how long they lasted, where they completed.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 14:23

You can look at the history of the client here and then all the upcoming bookings like maybe you have recurring appointments in the future, maybe she has an upcoming booking in two days. That would be there. Payments every business model is a little different, but if you have payments that you've received over a certain amount of time, you can scroll back and look at all the times that Allison has paid you for the certain products and services that you need that you offer. You also have maybe you've delivered some estimates to her that she may or may not be pondering over right now. And then, if you have due invoices or recurring payments and somebody has missed a payment or whatnot, you have overdue and due payments listed here too. And then, lastly, documents so this would be any documents that you would share with the customer. They would share with you. You've added internally to their profile here, maybe for other employees to see that are working within the system. But that's all here in one simple to use dashboard. And if you look at Allison over here, she's got the status of customer.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 15:30

You can customize your statuses that we're gonna thrive to fit your business model. So, lead customer, vip, the different statuses that you might have, that to fit your workflow. You can customize that there. And then we have a tagging system over here to the left, which just simply means that you can group the different people in your CRM so you she may be part of various groups, she may fit a certain mold, and so you would tag her, let's just say residential, and then anytime you went to send any marketing communication for any kind of residential work, that would go to Allison because she's part of that tag. If you've used other softwares, you're familiar with a little bit of tagging If you've used MailChimp or Constant Contact or some of these others. But it's just a good way to organize your CRM. So any questions? Lance, I know this is kind of a demo, but before moving to anything else, did you have any questions?

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 16:31

Well, I mean so. Am I able to sit there and trend like my customers that are doing the most revenue with us, customers that are the most unhappy, and look for those trends not only in customer interactions, but also in different locations? This location is killing it. Try to figure out what's going on so that we can create those best and next practices and share it with the rest of the people.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 17:00

No, it's a great question. So when I'm interacting, like when Thrive's interacting in the franchise space, we normally start with the franchise, or so our customer is the franchise, or but the user of the software is really the franchisee. But our hub tool that I was telling you about earlier, you know that's the thing is like when you're looking at all your you know locations and so you know, let's say, your top 10%, it's like what are the top 10% really doing, you know. And then that's really where you can draw the correlation, where if you're looking at hub and you see that someone, let's just say, is leading in getting appointments right, you can dial in and see okay, well, what is leading to that appointment?

Lance Hood (FranPro): 17:39

Is it the way that they send out their marketing campaigns? Is it the way that they respond to you know, form fills, like how quickly they respond to form fills and whatnot. You can start to really draw those best practices and KPIs in the system. So that answers your question to a certain extent. We don't have like NPS scores or anything like that inside of Thrive natively, but I think when you look at top line revenue you know who's generating the most revenue. Okay, well then, look just a little bit deeper, like what's actually leading to the customers that are leading to that revenue right, the marketing that may be leading to that. You can start to draw those conclusions inside our platform.

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 18:24

Right, I just would love to spend time just researching the top performing and bottom performing franchisees and then the top performing and bottom performing customers, because I think you know there's just when you have all this data in this situation like this, it's just a goldmine for your company. You know, I just love that, yeah, and I like you also with the communication. I love the fact that you have all the social stuff, but you also have reputation, so you're watching that stuff so that you're not dropping the ball, you know, on reputation and stuff. So I like it.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 18:59

Any other quick things that you want to show everybody real quick before we jump back I think, just for the sake of time, if you're looking down this navigation bar here to the left, we do have marketing. Marketing includes, like automated campaigns and email campaigns that you can set up to. You know, on a client's birthday, like 48 hours before their birth date, they get a coupon or an email from you. Or you know, when they become a lead, they get such and such email. Like you can set up those workflows for the types of leads and customers that you want, just like you came with any other email platform out there. You can manage your social media, like you were saying in here, and your reputation soliciting, also responding to reviews in the platform as well, and so I think that if you're a small business and you're serious about you know driving a great customer experience, you have to use tools like this.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 19:56

It's just whether you want to use seven or eight different tools with seven or eight different 800 numbers and seven or eight different logins, or if do you want it all corraled on one platform. And not to mention, you know those seven or eight different tools need to be connected via API and Zaps and all this other stuff that to make sure that it doesn't work or break. So that's really it. It's, there's really. This kind of stuff is not optional. For interacting with the modern consumer, consumers kind of expect a great experience, you know, before, during and after the sale. It's just really on you as the franchisor on. Do you want your franchisees using multiple different tools or do you want to consolidate the tech stack form so that you know they don't have to be a superstar tech person to really navigate your? You know, your concept?

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 20:50

Yeah, I know it's a hassle, I've done it myself. I know that.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 20:53

I love technology I've done it myself the idea of trying to connect it all and keep it working together is a hassle, yeah, and I mean I would just say you know, when you're trying to scale the brand, you know when you're working with franchise brokers or maybe you're doing franchise development yourself or in a and needing someone from MIT or some Ivy League school is to operate your brand, it's going to be really tough to scale. You know you just need good old average Americans that they're not looking for a really complicated system and technology is supposed to help them, not. You know, weigh them down and you know so that that's that's really why we exist is to help a franchise or make their system turn key. You know, by providing easy to use tech that you know any entrepreneur can use. Well then, so let's say, somebody clicks on the link next to this video. What is the process? What are they?

Lance Hood (FranPro): 21:52

going to see, say somebody clicks on the link, we have a process of them getting started and getting things implemented, they land on your side.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 21:59

Yeah, so we, there will be a link, you know. You click on it, you can schedule a time to meet with our franchise team or we, you know, we simply do a discovery call and do a more in depth demo with you to show you the product and how it works and if it does fit your business model and if we're a good fit for for what you do. If you're watching this, we serve, we help service. You know service oriented franchise brands. So we don't work in food, we don't do QSRs, but it's mainly, you know, the service space and so, yeah, just click the link at a demo and learn more about you.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 22:30

We don't have a really pushy sales process. We, we will bring in our product team along with our sales team to make sure that we're a good fit and then, if it is something that you want to do, we have done this with countless brands to help them transition from what they currently have to this vision of thrive that I just laid out. And you need a really good team to help you do that, because, on average, franchisors have anywhere from, you know, three to eight employees at the corporate location. It's not like it's, you know. There's hundreds of people to help you with that transition and we're an extension of your team and we're really you know, I think have the proven track record to help you transition from one platform to the next.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 23:10

So, matthew, so you mentioned that you guys have a franchise template that makes it very easy for people to sign up basically and set up their additional franchise units, and that's normally a $1000 a year and you guys want to waive that for everybody who's listening for free, correct?

Lance Hood (FranPro): 23:27

Yeah. So if you think about you know let's I don't know how many locations you know as a franchise or you're watching this you would have, but once we work with your team and we determine how you plan to leverage, thrive within your brand, we have a product that are a feature within our product. That's a it's just called a franchise template and essentially what you can do is you can customize all your settings, branding, you know, logos, all that stuff on this template and that way you can clone all your current and future accounts off that template. So when you pick up a new franchisee, instead of having to go in from scratch and create their account, everything just spins off that template and you create a new account within really minutes. We in our contracts with franchisee or that's $1000 a year and if you're watching this and you take part with Lance and his company, we are waiving that fee. So that $1000 a year fee will be completely complimentary for anyone that watches this and takes advantage of the offer.

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 24:32

Thank you, Matthew.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 24:33

That is awesome. Well, thank you, matthew, I appreciate it.

Matthew Gourgeot (Thryv): 24:36

Anybody who wants to save that $1000 a year. You can press the button next to this video and they will take care of you.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 24:44

Thanks, Lance.